Quick Shopping Cart® 2.0 Release
Hello to all our Quick Shopping Cart Owners. With much anticipation we released Quick Shopping Cart version 2.0 on Thursday, August 9th. This release introduces many of the features and enhancements that you have been requesting for the Storefront and we are very excited about the doors it opens up for you, the Quick Shopping Cart owner, to customize your site. This blog article will serve as a foundation article from which we will be adding our own comments into this thread with more tips and hints on how to get the most out of your new Storefront.
So, what is new in Quick Shopping Cart 2.0?
Storefront Customization
So, what is new in Quick Shopping Cart 2.0?
Storefront Customization
You now can customize the Header, Footer, invoices, and navigation menu (including adding your own buttons with your own links). We have introduced the notion of "site variables", which correspond to the fields in the Storefront Information page, to help you customize the html ready message blocks and these variables are available to be inserted into your text at the click of a button. We've increased the flexibility in the Preferences, so you can rename some of the labels (for example, rename Special Instructions to something of your own liking).
Theme management and customization
We upgraded the technology behind our storefronts from a tables based layout to a css based layout. This enables greater customizing of your colors and fonts and now you can tweak the format of practically every aspect of your template. We have also introduced a new category style (Style 6) which provides you with 3 columns of products underneath 2 columns of categories.
We are releasing 10 new template styles with this release that take advantage of the css styling. You'll see these templates listed in the "Generic" category. The 43 existing templates (now referred to as the "Classics") are still there and we retrofitted them to the css technology. We have another 40 or so templates being created, and these will be released in batches over the upcoming weeks. As we release a new batch of templates, they will be in the "New" category as well as their proper category. So, look in the New category to see the latest templates.
Storefront Performance
Your shoppers should notice a significant improvement in speed when navigating around your storefront. Note that actual results for your storefront will depend on many variables like internet connection speed and bandwidth.
Other
The usability of the PayPal checkout has been improved. We have enhanced the verbiage and graphics on the last page of the checkout to add clarity to the shopper on the steps they need to take in PayPal’s site to complete their QSC transaction. We are hoping that this will help alleviate the concerns that your shoppers are having about leaving QSC and going to PayPal and will result in more completed transactions for you.
We have updated the Help program and integrated it into the Online Help Center used by all the Go Daddy® products. Removing the Help from being inside the QSC application now means that we can do updates and add information to the Help with a minimum of behind the scenes effort. Our goal is to keep building out the Help to make it more useful for you, so if there are topics that you would like more information on, please let us know.
Also, stay tuned for the ability to view your full checkout process in Preview mode. That feature is almost ready and we will roll that out in the next few weeks with one of our template point releases.
We hope you enjoy the new Quick Shopping Cart 2.0 and we look forward to your feedback.
Best regards,
Rob
The update seems much more stable this time around!
One thing though, the option dropdowns (on the live site) aren't long enough... is this a theme specific option? If i chose a different theme (i'm using fresh air), would the option boxes be longer?
Anyways, looks great, just hope this issue can get resolved.
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Hi Justin
Thanks for the feedback, the product options dropdown is a known issue that we are working on.
Regards,
Rob
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I am working to obtain more business clients; however, during checkout there is not a field for a business name.
Will you be adding an optional field for the customer's company name for use during check out?
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Hi Gary
That is on the roadmap but currently behind other features that get more feedback. Your vote has been noted though!
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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Awesome. Just awesome. I've got at least 4 customers that will now be able to use QSC because of the new features and the ability to use CSS templates. Thanks so much, guys!
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Due to this new update all of my manufacturers are showing up on my products. There is no way to take them off. We use the manufacturer option in the past so we know where the items came from for reorders. I don't want my customers and competition to see this. Can you please fix this! All product display pages have them listed and there is no preferece to turn it off.
Thank you
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Hi Shane
Thanks for the observation. Yes, we will get this taken care of in the next patch release to make it optional to display.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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I'm very disappointed with the new format. It has made my site look terrible. I call customer service and they act as though I should accept having to pay someone hundreds of dollars to go in and change everything back.
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I agree....I was treated the same way by godaddy reps online and on phone. The rep actually told me that my options were to long!!! Do these people (reps)even work in youe office?
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Hi Ryan
We have put a fix in place that if you use Product Style 8, it accepts the longer option descriptions.
Regards,
Rob
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Can you do the same for a Product Style that shows the Options at the TOP instead of the bottom of the Product page? My descriptions are rather lengthy and I want to give people the option to purchase quickly without having to scroll down and read through the whole page.
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Greetings,
We'll certainly take that layout into consideration for a future template/ display option. Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback
John
QSC
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The update is fantastic! The only problem I'm having is I can't seem to change the black type in the product pages when you go to the Options layer. But I'm still looking. There's only 2 more things for me that would make this the perfect shopping cart! 1 - have the shopping cart summary appear in the right hand column of the product pages (where the featured item appears now). And 2 - an affiliate program where I can track my affiliates referrals. Add these 2 items, and I'm a customer for life!
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Saw your note on the GoDaddy blog regarding QSC 2.0 and the black type on product description....the fix is to enter the just before your text. I tried it on my site and it worked!
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I would first like to say thanks...the new upgrade is incredible! Job Well Done!
I only had a couple issues, not sure if I did something incorrectly.
The top left corner of our site is showing some code that I don't think should be showing?
And, I was trying to change the font size of the text for the navigation menu, but the drop down boxes are greyed out..will this be available to bold the text or make it larger?
Thanks for your help. And again, thanks for the upgrade. QSC Team really did a wonderful job!!!
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Hi Beverly
Thanks for the comments, we're glad you are liking the new version.
For your first comment, take a look at what text you have in the Customize Storefront Header section, there may be some rogue text in there. For the second, if the option is greyed out, it means that the particular style option is not customizable in that particular template. Different templates have different customization options so have a play around and see what takes your fancy.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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The new templates are really nice, but we can't change all the colors as you indicated. We have more control over the older versions than the new ones.
While I would love to use them, if I can't control all the colors in the background & text, then they are not usable. Nor can I use other features you have added, because as soon as I publish those features, my old template is lost, which means I have to go back into everything to change everything from the beginning. This is very time consuming, as you don't learn this until you have made lots of changes. A back out feature would be good, or the ability to select which changes you really want to have happen before you publish, as I might change my mind, and resort to the current default view for my company, not a template default view.
I thought we were going to have more control over these templates?
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This is the worst update I have ever seen in my life. I thought installing AOL on a computer was bad idea. This update takes the cake!
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The header does not seem to accept my align="center" for our Company Name - any guesses on how to set this?
Thanks and looking forward to LINKS back and forth to improve everyone google rankings : -( Wish THIS had been done before foo foo color, and template additions which help zero in improving our websites rankings - Please move this UP on whatever schedule for our Quick Shopping Carts - Without the ability to link to and from other websites we will never obtain any type of ranking.
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Greetings! Let me first say that I was impressed with the 10 "New" template designs, colors, and options..right up to when I tried using them. I started with Flower Power" first, then tried all ten, only to have failure with them all. But, there is a glitch. This is, when editing, the side navigation bar moving toward center screen upon previewing and after publishing. The "rep" that I spoke with, visited my site and actually saw this flaw. He said, "Hmmmm,...that's weird. Can you leave the site up for 24-48 hours so we can trace the problem?" You're kidding me, right? Leave a shopping site up, with flaws that'll drive customer's away the second they land on it. I really didn't have time to wait, nor did I feel like posting a note on my "Welcome Message" saying "Do not attempt to adjust your computer! We have taken control!". Of course, I am being sarcastic that I would make THAT comment. But honestly, weren't these templates tested online before submitting them to be used? And, do we have another way of tracing this glitch other than leaving one of our sites up that long, with THAT appearance??
I look forard to a report of this being fixed in the near future.
Sincerely disappointed,
Kevin K.
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Hi Kevin
Sorry to hear that the customer service rep gave you some bad advice. I think the root cause of the problem, and we have seen this consistently in the sites that are reporting problems, is that there is some malformed html on the page which is causing layout issues. When you, or anyone, sees areas where the layout looks strange, take a look at all the elements that are displaying on that page (product short and long description, welcome message, etc) as it is most likely that somewhere there is an open html tag or something like that.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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Hello again Rob.
Well, it wasn't so much that Customer/Technical Support gave me bad advice, but that I felt as though no advice was given. Just pretty much, "Well, we will check it out when we can" - kinda attitude. It would've saved me a lot of headache with, at least, tossing a suggestion or two at me.
So, I took your suggestion into consideration, and went through my html. Sure enough, it was exactly what you said,...an open html tag. Something as simple as not ending (/) my font. I will be more attentive to my details in the future!
I am now up and running with the template I like. Kudos to you!! Thanks again for your support!!
Sincerely Appreciative,
Kevin K.
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The size of the product "options" field has been reduced to the point one cannot read more than 1 or 2 words of the option choice, nor the price increase or decrease. The wizard the creates the "options" selection allows on to type many words of text to full describe the option. With one woprd being displayed a customer cannot tell what the options are and therefore cannot selct any. These are crutial to my product descriptions and am sure they are to others as well. By not being able to fully access a product/option description it is unlikely a customer will make a purchase. This is a key feature to me.
The Home page, "welcome" message text block no longer recognizes much html code. Bold and color are read but paragraph breaks, font size, etc... withion that field are no longer read after the ew upgrade. All texct typed into this area runs together as a single paragrpah. Same issue on each product page... paragraph breaks are not read in html any longer making this run together as well.
Hopefully these can be corrected before too much of my business is lost.
Otherwise I love the change. I'm glad to see my inventory numbers are no longer displayed on the pages my customers, AND COMPETITION sees!
Thanks again and I'm sure you'll have this taken care of soon.
Tony Miller
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Hi Tony
The product option issue is a known issue, only with IE7 (and we are working on it!), it renders fine in Firefox. Html tags should be working in product descriptions and Welcome message, we are seeing them working correctly. Check your html and if this continues to be a problem, contact customer service and review the particulars of your situation with them.
Overall, I am glad to hear that you are liking the improvements.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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Hi Tony,
Were you ever able to get your paragraph breaks to work? I haven't had the time to stay on the phone with customer service to get this resolved.
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Sorry, but the update is NOT pleasing to the eye. Paragraphs in html don't work in the 'Welcome message' area. The 'Click to Enlarge' text is gone even though the preference has been set to yes. Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you.
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Hi Samar
We have observed that the Click to Enlarge text is missing and this will be fixed in an upcoming patch release. The html in the Welcome Text appears to be an issue for some templates and not for others and we are working on that too.
Thanks for the comments,
Rob
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I agree with the Head Wench, in that we need more control over our ability to link to other sites, add/upload meta data or verification files for google and yahoo as they both provide the same ability to help get our shopping carts crawled and increase our sites rankings in their search engines, especially with sites that are shop.mydomain.com.
Example of linking sites you mentioned in past posts was the ability to have our logo link to our main site vs. just our shopping carts, when is this going to be changed?
Also, when will we have the ability to change all the colors in the new template and what of my other comments?
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Hi Vincent
You can change the logo link right now. The Customize Storefront Header page has the href for the logo on the top line, so you can type over with whatever url you want.
The Customize Storefront Header and Footer are sections where you can put in whatever html you want. Storefront Preferences is where you can put in your own menu buttons.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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Rob,
Not so sure it is my coding. My html may not be perfect but my welcome message was displaying correctly with a bold title centered on the top, smaller subtitles below, paragraph breaks, etc.....
After the upgrade everything was the same size, still bold at leat and run together with no breaks. The same html commands were displayed in the text block that works moments before the upgrade.
Looking forward to the IE7 fix for the options though.
BTW, is there any way to delete the long list of options choices once created? After 2 years with Quick Shopping Cart I have maybe 30 option choice listed, many for products I no longer sell. Can that list be deleted to start fresh so as not to have to search through all to find the 5 or 6 I use now?
Thanks,
Tony
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Hi Tony
We're working on the fixes and will be releasing a couple of patch releases as we get them done. We are working on a html validator tool as well so people will be able to know if their html is compliant or not.
Yes ,you can add new options and delete options (just not edit actual option names). Under the Catalog tab there is a menu item for Options. You'd want to then check that your products are listing the options correctly once you've made those changes.
Thanks for the contributions,
Rob
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Same issue - "Welcome" html box and "product description" html boxes no longer recognize any simple html like paragraph breaks or font sizes. Customer Service reps said my html was probably too complex for QSC - yet it worked perfectly before the release. If I copy and paste my source code from the "broken" version displaying after the 2.0 release onto an html editor or display page - it shows up perfectly. There is definately a weird coding issue with the new QSC not recognizing simple html.
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Hi Nicole
We have posted some information to a System Announcement to address this. Essentially, with the new technologies that have been put in place to make the customizations etc work, a by-product is that simple old html is no longer good enough. It needs to be XHTML1.0 compliant .
Thanks for the comments,
Rob
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Hi Tony,
I too like the update, but am having some issues. I like Flower Power, but it is causing some issues with the way my site looks. I was using orange peel (still have my website up under the old one). The new orange peel is slightly different than the old one. However, as stated I really want to use Flower Power as it gives my site that look I am really after.
I am having the same issues as Anthony Miller had, in your response to him you mentioned it was an "IE7 issue and works fine in Firefox". Well, I hate to tell you this, but I only use Firefox and everything is goofed up in that as well. Not only are all my paragraphs running together on the product pages (yes, used html to separate them), but it is also doing that on the terms and conditions page. Also on t&c page, all the items that I have checked and use, are all moved around and do not show in order like they did when I was using the old orange peel version.
A couple of other suggestions, Flower Power would be perfect if you could either make a couple of the following suggested chances or make another template of it with additional features: have it act like the old orange peel did so that on category style pages option 2 can be used (when used now it puts them into a long vertical look instead of long horizontal). This would work much better for me than having to use option 1 which I am using at the time to play around with this template before publishing. I really like the color combinations, but it would be nice if you could add some softer versions for folks like us who cater to babies (am fooling around with softer combinations myself, but like some of the other people said, not all areas are customizable).
Also any chance of adding a gift registry at some point in time? I agree that the affiliate part would be good too. Add both of those and you will also have me for life as well. Keep up the good work!
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How "fun" to have newly designed templates to play with - but it doesn't read any simple html coding on the Welcome page - I quit looking at our site after this big Bananna Flop!
If codes don't work even on the Welcome page and customer services tells me they can't DUPLICATE this error DUH - I also would like the ability to ROLL BACK our site to when it worked, looked BETTER and took the few html codes we were allowed to code in before this update.
I'm very disappointed that more important issues are still not available (such as the ability to provide recipocal links for better website ranking!!!!), before "pretty" templates were rolled into this update.
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The new invoice format is awful. The unit price and total price columns have been merged. For each line item, only the unit price is show, and then a subtotal under that same column reflects the sum of the total prices not shown. Customers have been calling confused by this layout. I have never seen an invoice with this sort of layout. This has to be changed immediately or I will look hard at migrating to a new host. This was obviously developed by someone who knows nothing about customer usability.
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Hi Keith
We are looking into the issue with the invoices to try and get back the line item subtotal for an upcoming patch release.
Thanks for reporting it,
Rob
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I am totally disgusted with this software roll out and the way it has highjacked my website. The font I have for my whole website doesn't work (it may be fixed in the next patch) the whole template is over 1/3 smaller (why?) than the current one, and many other things don't work like they should as well as the layout being almost totally different. Nice you can have add cart buttons and color them in the product thumbnails under the catagory but can't apply changes to any other add to cart buttons to make them match unless you figure out what the rest of them are colored as, that is very inconsistent. Some of the font options don't have ability to change font or font size, just color, when I used a different font to create the atmosphere on my website it is critical that ALL fonts be changed! I can't currently add products to my catalog and publish without changing the whole flavor of my website. They have regressed in service as far as taking out some of the subtle sophistication that used to exist in the program. For instance if you had more than one upsale item or related items there was a slight difference in background color for each line. Can we preview the templates in our own color schemes anymore without having to reset all the customizations? Why are all the offered page layout templates essentially the same, and with the 1/3 size reduction they are all cramped up, and why did they decide to add the manufacture and product number under the picture? I don't want the manufacture showing to clients and others, should be able to opt out!
NOw I do have to say I like being able to add new menu buttons and having two different spots to have them. And best of all it seems to work.
over all I don't think there was enough testing prior to release and while a lot of work may have gone into this, why are we subjected to a W*****ws type horror of a software roll out with many things broken and our websites looking like crap if we choose to use it before patches come out (in a couple of weeks, probably). Face it these are businesses livelyhoods being messed up! I have put my complaints through to President's office.
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I wish there was a way for me to obtain and even require a fax number.
It would be great if we could apply shipping options (ground, second day or overnight) with different charges.
Integration with GoogleCheckout would be another great feature!
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It has been brought to my attention that many of the QSC features of which we pay good hard earned money for every month, do not function. For example, choosing to display the text " Click to enlarge" under your product images is inoperative. I have also noticed that when rolling your cursor over the product images, the cursor does not change indicating the image is "clickable". In addition the particular "template" that we selected does not display "featured products" even though we have selected the option to display featured items. These inoperative features are exactly the reason that we purchased the QSC product, now the features do not function. I guess where I am confused, is why would my firm be invoiced for a completely functioning product when it only functions partially. When I paid for my new car, It came complete with 4 tires not 3. When I called GD customer service, I was informed, tough luck. In this country invoicing for products and services not rendered is not only unethical business practice is illegal under the fair trade commission statues. I cannot comprehend the following concept; why would your organization expect to receive full monthly payments for services you are not providing? I do not expect to receive a legitimate explanation, although a response would be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Ron Siegal
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Hi Ron
Thanks for reporting the issues. We have a couple of patch releases lined up for the next couple of weeks to address these things that come up. The Click to Enlarge issue is in Dev right now for an upcoming patch release.
Featured item not showing up could be the template chosen does not display featured items (not all templates have it). For example, you have chosen Solid Neons and the thumbnail for the template shows that it does not display Featured Items. Other templates will display that option so you may want to consider one of those.
Thank you for the feedback.
Rob
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Very well said Ron! I see you didn't get much of an explanation either. I feel that we should have a working product or we shouldn't have to pay for the service. I have lost money due to this debacle. I did not subscribe to this service for it to cost me money! The bugs should have been worked out of this before it was released. Was there no pre-release testing? It doesn't seem like it. Roll it back to when it worked, fix it then re-release or give me my money back and I'll find a service that works. Period!
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Hi Jim
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what else of an explanation I could give Ron. His 2 issues identified are in patch releases, either released or upcoming, and the reason he could not see his Featured Items is that he chose a template design that does not display it.
If you are experiencing problems with your site please contact customer service so that they can resolve the issues.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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The new release seems to work much better, but I still do not see an option to ship via FEDEX. Is this something which is scheduled to be available in the near future?
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Hi Robert
Shipping by Fedex is on the radar, but its a fair way out. We are most likely going to be adding international shipping with our existing carriers first.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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I am very disappointed in the new upgrade's lack of user friendliness. I am a small business owner trying to make a living using modern technology without becoming an html programmer. I signed up for and setup this QSC because it was easy to use. Now I have to try to recreate all of my colors for a third time and the invoices for my customers look very cheap. I know that I can "customize" them by using html coding but I don't have time to learn it. It looks as if your companies' move is more towards those with html experience. I noticed that you haven't been responding to those who are complaining but I would like to know if there is any plan make the setup friendly again to those of us who don't know html. Also, Is it possible to have a generic invoice format that looks similar to the old format? Something that we can just select as we do with the product layout? I would greatly appreciate a response so that I can decide if I need to start looking for other options regarding my online store. I can't continue to use what is there now. P.S. I called tech support and was told that they would pull my colors and invoice out of my old setup and install it in my new setup. The next day I got an email with ascii color codes that I was supposed to "customize" into the upgrade. I don't know what colors these codes correspond to or what section they should be in much less the coding for installing them!
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Hi Jim
I have posted some information against other posts to talk to the html issues. And actually, with simple or no html you would be just fine. Its the sites that have fairly complex html that has not been constructed well that are having the problems.
As for the colors and fonts, we have not been able to directly apply the old settings to the new, as the old settings provided between 4-6 background color options whereas depending on the template chosen the new settings provide between 10-30 elements to customize. So, the only option has been to at least provide the exact hex codes for the colors you were using, so that you could then play around with the templates on offer and decide where you wanted to put what.
We are working on the invoice issue to get the subtotal column back. If you want the invoice to be simpler, all you have to do is remove elements from the field (eg remove the logo, remove the address information etc). The online help in the admin has been beefed up and I encourage everyone to try and use the Help for guidance. Where you find the Help to be deficient, let us know and we will add information to it.
Its been a busy week since the release and I have been trying to reply to the different comments that have been posted, rather than say the same thing over and over.
Thanks for the contributions,
Rob
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Hi Rob,
Upgrade look great.. but i just have one question, the invoice format has changed, the new format displays the "each" price on the right hand side but DOES NOT display the total price for multiple orders of the same item, therefore the sub-total directly underneath does not add up correctly!! this may cause confusion to some customers is there a way of showing the total price for each item as it was originally?
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Hi Katrina
The subtotal at the bottom should still be the correct number, but we have noted the missing column for subtotal of each line item and we are working on a fix for that issue to go in a patch release.
Thanks for the comments,
Rob
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Hi Rob,
Thanks for your quick reply, can you tell us the estimated time for the release of the patch?? We are being contacted by customers - we also understand the sub total is correct lower right but the above totals don't total to the same amount??? needs to be fixed asap.
Any idea if days, weeks or months?
Thanks Katrina
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Hi Katrina
We have a series of patches lined up (one is going out today for the google meta tags and to make some headway on the product option dropdown issue). The invoice work is going to take a bit longer than some of the quicker fixes, so its probably 1-2 weeks away to get the subtotal for the line items back in there (as you observed, right now you just see the unit cost of the line item displayed).
Thanks for your patience.
Rob
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I have reviewed my product page HTML over and over, and there is no broken HTML. It is also XHTML 1.0 compliant as stated it had to be. It is some strange size issue as another QSC user mentioned. It smashes the box size (why?) and disrupts all of the HTML code. Font sizes and paragraph breaks are still all messed up. I am positive if you polled all QSC customers, an overwhelming majority would much rather lose the "conveniences" of the 2.0 version and roll back to the working version. This IS our livelihoods, and the fact is, we ARE losing customers and money. The search function is a nightmare and doesn't work anymore either.
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Hi Nicole
Search should be working now with the patch we deployed today. As for the html, we realise that there will be some problems with old, "untidy" html now being checked for compliancy, which is why we added this message to the System Announcements.
QSC 2.0 requires custom HTML to be XHTML1.0 compliant to ensure that it works with all browsers. There is a html validator tool at http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_upload+with_options that migt be a useful resource. Take your text, save it into a notepad txt file, add the html and body tags to it and then run it through the validator on the XHTML1.0 Transitional setting to see if there are errors. The old system was HTML 4.01 Transitional, for reference.
In order to apply a style to the list, you have to specify it inline, like this:
<ul style="list-style-type: disc">
Upgrading to the higher standard of html was necessary to enable the css style sheets to exist with custom html code without any negative interactions and overwriting. The css was necessary to enable all the customization options that our customers have been asking for.
Thanks for the input,
Rob
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Rob,
The above is helpful but only solves SOME of the problems.
1) In IE, the text in a table does not always align vertically, as it used to. For this one, I found a fix that works for me. I define the row like this:
blah, blah, blah
2) In Firefox, using the same code, images in a table do NOT ALL unless it has some text with it, and then only is as wide as the text itself. I need a fix for this one, if anyone has one....???
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Rob,
Thanks. I had not seen that Options menu before. Actually it does let me change the option name too! Once changed though you need to add it back to the product as it will be removed when re-named.
Tony
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One other small glitch is the cursor arrow. As I move across any of my product pages it remains an arrow when passing over the thumbnail image, not indicating to most people that it is indeed a clickable link to a larger image. It only changes to the little click here hand on my buttons, etc...
Tony
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Hi Tony
Yeah, we are still working on that one.
Regards,
Rob
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Hooray! they fixed the broken font!! plus a few other things. I'm glad to see it. HOpe the other fixes will hit the mix soon.
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Hi Bernie
Yep, we are working on the issues as fast as we can. Thanks for your patience. We'll update the System Announcements as we release more patches.
Regards,
Rob
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Search doesn't work, and I just republished after a change. If I search for "RL" (as in Acura RL) on my site - all RL listings pull up. If I type in "96 RL" tons of unrelated items pull up. (Search seems to be looking for every single character rather than specific words as it did before) Why does the PRODUCT HTML BOX have to be 1.0? Every other change is upsetting but manageable. Can you make the product box for HTML only back to how it used to be? Isn't GoDaddy supposed to be for small business owners? That was the attraction to using GoDaddy is it was simple to use. Now its like we're expected to take multiple computer programming courses just to use this service???
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Hi Nicole
As far as we can see from our testing, Search should be working as designed. If you type in a 2 word query without the " ", it will return any product that has either of those 2 words. If you type in a query with the " ", eg "97 RL" it is going to only return products that have 97 immediately followed by RL. So, for example on your site "1997 RL" returns no hits, because your RL descriptions are "1997 Acura RL". If you are still experiencing problems, please contact customer support with some specific examples and we will work through it with you.
The Quick Shopping Cart is designed to be quick and simple, yet have the flexibility via its support of html to allow more advanced users the ability to customize. A person with no html experience can be successful with this cart by just typing in their product descriptions. QSC does not require html knowledge to be able to enter information into the product descriptions or other message areas. With the css techology that provides the flexibility, we have to put in the constraints on structure so that inputting custom html does not mess up the page layouts (you could say that we were "lucky" with the previous version that the browsers interpreted/guessed and rendered bad html reasonably well, and that was aided by the locked down nature of the template - and this locked down nature was our customers's largest complaint!). Again, no html experience is required to have a successful basic "quick" shopping cart.
Thanks for the feedback,
Rob
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Hello Rob,
I have an issure with the new store layout.... In the old version you could make the background for long description black and in your new version there is no way to edit this so you get a huge white box that looks out of place. I would like to know if there is a way you can add the description to change background color and fonts in the Custom fonts and color menu. I have custom built the complete store and can change and modify everything but the long description.
I called in and they had no idea of how to fix this. I did however get an email saying to just ad HTML but as you know if that is not done just right it will crash the complete page. Can you help me out with the problem I am having?????
I do not see why you can not just add a section in the custom font and color tab to creat the colors you want. I do not want a white box around my text and pictures as it looks very cheap.
Please help ASAP as I can not post my new store till I work this problem out. thanks
Chris Fesler
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Hi Chris
I took a look at your site and I see that the "page" option in the Colors and Fonts list will change the color on most of the area, but not the title area, so we have written it up as a bug for the next patch release.
An option you may be interested in looking at is changing the template to the new Checkered Flag. It is a black themed template. Of course, the downside is that you will lose your custom colors and fonts when you change, but you will be able to see the new site in Preview without having to publish. I understand this is extra work behind the scenes, but it does enable you to play around without affecting the published site. (To answer your obvious comment, we do have an enhancement fix in the works to be able to port across from one template to another whatever common style elements there are so that you don't lose all the customizations).
Thanks for the post,
Rob
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I agree that 2.0 is a mess, however, the real problem is with the customer suport or "reps"... You people should have checked this upgrade or download before you made it live and made my site DEAD. That is basic info, but what is worse is the cheeseballs you have responding to our issues and complaints by email or by phone do not have a clue and are not willing to actualy help with the issue at hand. Nothing seems important to them but the rep had the nerve to tell me that my account was past due by on day. Any guesses why I have not paid yet? I won't pay for a site that can't make me money. What do you say to that Rob?
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Hi Ryan
I am sorry you feel that way. We are doing the best we can (knowing that we can all always try to be better). A lot of testing went into this release and all I can say is that there is such a wide variety of implementations of the QSC out there that you can't physically test all the edge cases so you go with the "majority rules" approach.
Regards,
Rob
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With the recent update you have changed the format of the invoice to only show Price. The previous invoice showed price and amount. How can you expect a customer to do the calculation themselves. I have never seen an invoice that doesn't show price each and extended amount. I am told this was done by the developers to streamline the invoice process. How about asking your users if this would work. It is unfortunately enough to have me thinking about another shopping cart and hosting service.
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Hi Robert
This is currently a known issue with the invoice and it will be fixed in an upcoming patch release.
Thanks for the observation,
Rob
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I wish all the bugs were fixed before 2.0 was rolled out. I liked 1.97...cleaner looking, accepted simple html. I'm sure 2.0 has added some wonderful features for many but for a small website like mine and for someone with limited experience, I now have to figure out how to create a simple paragraph break!
Look at my site...big, fat ugly text everywhere, specially in the category and product pages.
I guess I really didn't have a question so I don't expect an answer...except does GD give a refund if I've already paid for a year?
Thank you!
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Hi Samar
Simple html will work just fine on your site. You don't actually even need to use html. That is one of the aspects of it being a "quick" shopping cart. You build a product, insert a brief description and you are done.
I took a look at your site and it seems to be looking alright. If you are unhappy, please feel free to contact customer service to explore your options.
Regards,
Rob
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oops! I applauded to soon for the fix on the fonts!! There are still several places that don't change as they should - best Values headings, Related Items heading, Product pages, Welcome page message (except for the link I have in my welcome message which is recognized as a link and changes accordingly )and I have tried about 6 different options of html code to try and change this area, and why do we still have to have the in stock under the picture? That should be with the quantity, price and add to cart. Only thing I want near the picture is click to zoom if needed! come on people this is really standard! If you don't have time to "test" all the "edge cases", how about having some of the "edge cases" do the beta testing for you?
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Hi Bernie
Valid comment about the beta testing and it is something that has come out of internal discussions to try and come up with something in that area, maybe at least providing a sandbox so people can play with new features and give feedback.
Regarding the fonts, please pass on to support the specifics of templates/fonts that you are trying to change and we will get them fixed.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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I couldn't agree more with complaints about customer service. Any issue of substance goes to tier 2 but the inability not to communicate with them directly is maddening. The back and forth of email is very frustrating. And the standard wait of 48 to 72 hours for support on a product that I pay what I pay for this product is unsettling at best.
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Hi Jeff
Thanks for the feedback, I will be passing on these comments for internal review.
Regards,
Rob
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Rob,
Please address this issue, as no one at the help center can seems to know what is going on. I want to go live with Flower Power and other than the html not displaying properly on the product descriptions (guess I will have to export, fix the product descriptions and then upload), the other big issue is that on the the terms and conditions page, everything is displaying differently (of the ones I chose to use).
Originally with orange peel it was: copyright, consumer agreement, shipping & delivery, sales tax, return policy, store hours and then miscellaneous. Now with flower power it is: copyright, consumer agreement, miscellaneous, sales tax, return policy, shipping & delivery and store hours. My customers will not want to have to read through all the other stuff to get to the shipping & delivery information. Perhaps it would be a good idea to have the t & c area not only allow you to select which ones you want to use, but also a way to change the order in how to display the t & c that are selected. Please help with this, as I really need to get the new site published so that the new changes I have made can go live.
Thanks,
Patti
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Hi Patti
The patch release should have fixed the issues with Flower Power product descriptions being jammed up. Let us know if you still experience problems (a few random clicks on your site look ok to me).
The Terms and Conditions page does seem to be rendering in the Storefront in a different order to how its displayed in the Admin, so we have a bug opened to fix that for a patch release. I have logged an enhancement request to make that list order customizable (as you know, you can already select which ones you want to use or not).
Thanks for bringing up the issue.
Rob
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Hi Rob,
You're right. When looking at my website, it is still up under the old orange peel style. So everything is showing correctly there.
I did not just want to jump the gun and choose a new template when the update came out and put it up to only experience all the problems everyone else is. I still have not published the new flower power one yet, as I wanted to be able to make sure everything was working okay before publishing it. So the errors I am seeing are when I "preview" it. The problem with the product descriptions, is that flower power is not recognizing the and tags and that's the only real issue I am having with the coding part. Thanks for checking in to it though.
I can only imagine how frustrating this is for you, as well as for the rest of us. Thanks for being there and helping.
Patti
PS Any chance of a gift registry being added in the future?
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Greetings,
Rob is currently on assignment in an undisclosed location but he left the shop, er cart, with me time being. I believe the issues with the flower template have been resolved , but let me know if you're still seeing anything out of sorts. A gift registry and ,the closely related ,wish list is indeed on the roadmap for the future .
Regards
John
QSC Team
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Hi John-
any date or time frame in mind for adding a wish list category to the QSC?
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Greetings Kondra,
Adding a wish list is certainly a suggestion we have captured for inclusion within Quick Shopping Cart but it is not yet scheduled in an upcoming release.
Regards
John
QSC Team
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Hey Rob,
It's me again. I was just playing around with the coding in the t & c and product description areas and both recognize the command, but not the or (and yes, everything is showing as being correct in the html validator with the single commands). Don't know if this info. will help or not. Just throwing it out there in case.
Patti
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After several calls to the customer service line, it is apparent that individual templates have flaws that did not exist before the 2.0 roll-out. In our case, the Yellow Jacket classic template has the following problems.
1. The site is too narrow compared to before the roll out.
2. There is no way to set a hover color for the links in the Category Box,
3. The SSL logo and Secondary Menu are no longer centered in the footer.
4. The Welcome text is below the Welcome image instead of to the right (as it was before the roll out with the same template).
These issues make our site look less professional and make our customers concerned that "something has changed". Since publication, our sales have dropped by 50%!!!
How quickly can we expect these issues to be fixed? A few of the new templates do look nice, but are actually less flexible. For example, I cannot change the color scheme in the new template - an essential thing to "brand" our site.
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Dear Clare,
Firstly let me apologise for the time taken to respond to this and I'll respond on a point by point basis
1
2) We're looking at ways to greater increase the flexibility in altering any/ all aspects of the template display and I've added that to our future options.
3) The SSL logo and navigation are indeed off kilter and will be remedied in a future release
4) This was a recently addressed issue that appears to be functioning on your site, if it's still an issue try republishing for the fix to take effect.
Regards
John
QSC
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Honestly, i really like this release... I think you guys did a great job, and completely understand how impossible it is to test every single possible bug.
I'm very happy with the upgrade and am looking forward to the patches for what i feel are very minor issues for what was greatly improved.
Good work!
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Greetings Justin
Thanks you for the kind words and in taking the time to let us know. I suspect your assessment is spot on
Regards
John
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When will we have the ability to change all the colors and fonts in the new templates? I would like to use the new templates, but not until we can change the colors and fonts to meet our companies style.
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Greetings,
We certainly have this on our roadmap for future inclusion . The recent changes are a step in that direction.
Regards
John
QSC Team.
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So far, I'm pleased with the new 2.0 release except for the invoice thing (which sounds like a recent patch will fix it). But for the life of me I can not get my company name and slogan centered on my header. Can someone please tell me if this is a bug that is going to get fixed in an upcoming patch release. Or, if someone can post or email me the HTML code to make it work I'll be very grateful. The final thing is when I add the Email Address option in the header, it does not make the typical HTML mailto link. On the old cart, you can just click on my email address tony@tony1034.com and it would bring up a new email in Outlook, etc.
My site looks pretty good with the new 2.0 release. The fonts have been improved over the same theme in 1.9.7. I especially like the "add to cart" option on the product page. Keep up the good work.
Thanks and best regards,
Tony P.
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Dear Tony,
Thanks for taking the time to contact us with regards to the recent changes. I've included code to resolve the two items you brought up. The mail should indeed link to a mailto and I've asked that we remedy that in a future release.
<a href="mailto:yourmail@mail.com">%QSC-SITE-EMAIL%</a>
Secondly try using this line to center the Company name and slogan.
<div style="text-align: center;"> the stuff </div>
Regards
John
QSC team
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Hello,
I've noticed that the footer can now have code. Was wondering if something like ONESTAT or something similar can be added? It would be great if we could see our traffic stats.
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Greetings,
As long as the code validates XHTML1 compliant then I believe that would work though I have not managed to get Onestat's JS code to work in this manner. If I find something similar that reliably works will post about it.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Statcounter works... i have it hidden in my header.
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Justin,
Glad to hear,
Regards
John
Qsc Team.
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Suggestions:
Product Page Layout: Add a global feature that we can add, images, links, or other global content type things, such as tips to think about to help the customer during the purchasing process, general shipping information, etc...
My example is for layout #7, have the global area below the checkout section/blocked area
Having looked at many other shopping sites, they all seem to have something along these lines that can be customized to show standard information, like email a friend, add this item to a wish list, ask a question about this product, etc...
Speaking of wish lists, will this be a feature so users can store their favorite items, and come back to buy verses searching for them again?
Thanks,
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Greetings Vincent,
Thank you for taking the time to suggest adding a "service" block and ways to utilize it. Great ideas and ones that we've mostly got in our plans but I'll make sure we fill in the gaps in your wish list as that's one thing that has always irked me about finding just the right thing and then forgetting it again .
Regards
John
QSC team.
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Suggestion
Can we get our dimensions show for each product in our product page? This would be easier than re-typing it in the description box and as we already have this information for shipping reasons associated with each product.
Thanks,
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Some more issues, was it noted that the click to zoom function does not show up on all the pictures, in the preview mode?
If not, I am having that problem.
Also, when you have items that use the adjusted price everything is shifted to the right, which drops the Buy Now Add to Cart button, down a line. This should be shifted to the left more so this doesn't happen, as I would like the buy now button right under the picture versus having the customer have to look for that button, plus it would be consistent with the rest of the items. Product page style #7, is the template I am having the problem with.
Thanks
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QSC Update is great but has a few bugs.
1. Shipping calculator is taking the cost to ship one item and multiplying it by the number ordered to get shipping costs! For instance, if it costs $4 to ship one of and item it is charging $40 to ship ten - we know that is incorrect. Customers are abandoning carts and calling me screaming that I am gouging them for shipping :(
2. Black text in product options - can this be changed?
3. HTML code in product description not working...my paragraph tag is not being recognized as before.
THANKS for making the PayPal checkout instructions more clear - hopefully will alleviate their concerns :)
If we could just get the shipping calculator fixed it will be superb!
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Dear Stacy,
Thanks for the kind words and now let me
1: This certainly does sound like it's working and we're taking a look at how this is operating within the cart, and your cart specifically and see what's occuring.
2: Not presently changeable but will be considered for a future edition.
3: You are correct the P tag is being handled in an odd manner which we're going to take a look at and hopefully have out soon.
Regards
John
QSC
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Is there any way we can get a copy of the .css files associated with our templates so that we can use the built in styles within our product descriptions and text?
Also, an advanced feature allowing us to upload custom xhtml pages to our site would be very helpful. (This would go well with the ability to add custom menu links) I realize quick shopping cart is primarily targeted towards people with little to no html experience, but I'm sure the advanced functionality for those that are experienced with it would be appreciated.
No rush, we would all like you to concentrate on fixing the current bugs and high priority problems first. Just a couple ideas I thought I would share.
Also, I haven't been able to use tables successfully since the XHTML 1.0 compliance feature. List styles, and everything else seems to work fine. the w3schools website is very helpful for making code changes. However, it may be a good idea if someone were to post an XHTML 1.0 guide here on the blog as well. (I would be willing to volunteer for this if no one else has time, provided I can figure out why my tables aren't working of course. *grin* )
Thank you all for your hard work on QSC. It is greatly appreciated.
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Greetings,
The css can be obtained either by viewing source, near the top, on your store of using a tool such as CSS view for Firefox which you can hover over the store and see the values associated with the complete item.
You indeed bring up a good topic for a future blog post and as soon as I persuade somebody to write it
Regards
John
QSC team
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Although I appreciate the effort to give us more control over customization, I have to say that overall I am not impressed. All I wanted to do was put some items on sale, and I wound up spending hours trying to re-create the previous look before I publish.
General suggestion: there should have been or you should quickly work on a option that allows shopping cart owners to retain the old settings with the new update. Then, if they so desire to use the new "improvements", they can move forward without reinventing the wheel.
Two specific problems I noticed:
1. The text no longer automatically wraps around an image on the Welcome page (saw somebody else's comment on this too!).
2. Product options on all the available product page templates do not line up as nicely as they did before. I think this causes the shopping cart to appear very unprofessional, just before the customer makes a purchase!
I hope you are working on fixes to these problems, otherwise, I can see a few business owners "jumping ship" as soon as they can. Hop to it!
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Dear Steve,
Firstly let me apologise for the delay in responding to your post though the reasons hopefully will mitigate this a bit. We've been working on both items mentioned. On your first issue that has been addressed and you should be able to see the effects on your site. If not please republish. Secondly this is being addressed in the near future and we'll update the blog when these are in place.
As to the manner in which the upgrade was carried out I appreciate your comments and will be working to ensure future changes of this nature aren't as disruptive to the normal workflow.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Rob,
Are people still working on the search function changes?
I have tried this on the site on different computers on both AOL and IE7 and if I search for just about ANYTHING on my site that I know is there - it takes close to 10 tries before it actually finds it. I just now searched for the word "VIBE" (as in Pontiac Vibe which I have several listings for). I keep getting a message saying:
"Sorry, we could not find any matches for Vibe. Please check your spelling or search for a different key word. "
I click the "GO!" button next to the search box over and over and over and after several times it finally finds the page that has been there the whole time.
I try a new one now..."Corolla".
"Sorry, we could not find any matches for Corolla. Please check your spelling or search for a different key word."
Click "GO!" again and it suddenly finds the 21 matching items that were there the whole time.
The first listing is "1990 Toyota Corolla Keyless Entry Remote 90 LE SR5 GT-S"
Ok, so I should be able to type in "1990 Corolla" and find this...right?
"Sorry, we could not find any matches for 1990 Corolla. Please check your spelling or search for a different key word. "
I click "GO!" again 3 times to finally get the results to pull up.
The first item that pulls up:
"1990 Toyota 4Runner Keyless Entry Remote 90 Base SR5 SUV"
Thats not what I was searching for.
Sales are down about 50% since the 2.0 - I can only imagine how many customers I lose because the items they search for (which are definately on my site) appear to not exist to them so they go elsewhere.
Please please please please get this straightened out?
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Greetings Nicole,
I've taken a look at this and indeed the search doesn't function as you would expect. We're currently doing an OR search so we're looking for 97 or RL rather than AND search which we could certainly consider. The drawback is that over a large amount of data trying to match 97 and model and make etc gets increasingly complex.
I've been unable to replicate the issue where you click the same search multi times prior to getting a response but we'll look into it as that's certainly unwanted behavior. E.g Vibe gets me the results first time , every time.
Regards
John
QSC
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Regarding my search questions just posted - I am NOT using the quotes ("") when searching. Before the release I could type what I wanted to find - RL would pull up every RL listing. 97 RL would pull up the 97 RL listing. 1997 RL would pull up the 1997 RL listing. Now if I type in the years at all 1997, or 97 it will ONLY search for the year and not RL at all.
I need to type in RL to pull up every single RL listing and scroll to them to find it.
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Responded in prior comment.
John
QSC Team
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Invoice issue has been sorted out much quicker than we were told - Thank you so much :)
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Here our my biggest complaints/comments,
#1 The templates and what we can and can not change in each template, needs to be listed some place. Especially since once you change templates, you loose all previous work in the other template, no saves, no export/import.... I say this because you "won't know what CSS changes you can or can not make until you choose the template".
What happens if you change your mind, or this old or new template doesn't allow you to change all the text, or all the fields, or all the areas of the template? Guess what, we get to do all that work over again, and try again with another template that we know nothing about.
I know you mentioned in a side note during a reply that a tool was being developed to handle CSS custom info between templates, but without knowing what template has what options, even if we have this tool you don't realize you won't have control over every area until you have made the change. My DRUM is very loud on this!
The reason is because this is our (shop owners) "GODaddy" customers biggest issue, is display of our products, colors and fonts to our liking with the ability to control these items.
2nd Biggest issue, is product layout, with the click to zoom, pictures not indicating to the customer you can click here for another lower level of info, and overall layout choices seem to be missing the mark??
Our layout choices for our products are not up to speed with the rest of world, if you look at Target, Amazon, Dell, they give you the ability to show more products across the page, and more information on the final product page (shipping tips, customer reviews, other categories for details, etc...) to help the customer make a decision to buy from us.
#3 Also, highlighting that our stores are secured from GoDaddy with its custom shopping cart and linkage to secure credit card validation sites like PayPal, etc... As a small business online security means something to our customers, such as showing our sites are secure & hacker free will show our buyers we are safe to buy from because of customer shopping cart, etc...
#4 The ability to have a global section where we can easily add pictures, notes, links to shipping rules, return policies, etc... on the Product page and a different one for the category view will allow us to keep our customers on our products pages longer, so hopefully they purchase our products as they have all the decision making information they need right there.
#5 SEO ability, my best search found pages by Google are my "terms and conditions" and "aboutus" pages! I have over 250 products, google for one doesn't show them all, nor can you tell what they are until you click on the link, as the meta data is not custom for each product... after two years my products should be easier to find with searches
#6 communication on what you are doing, when we can expect it, priorities! We want this info, so we can tell our customers why something happened & est fix time...
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Hello Vincent,
Thanks for your comments. The 43 "classic" themes support the same set of customization features, so if you switch between classic themes you will know what to expect. Likewise, the new themes (currently in the "Generic" category but there are more coming) support a more limited set of customizations. These are consistent across the new themes.
Regarding the product layouts, we realize and agree that the heart and soul of an online shopping experience is product presentation. With Quick Shopping Cart 2.0 we've added several new product layouts to help meet your
needs, and we continue to follow customer feedback and will be adding new capabilities/layouts in future releases.
Your #3 point discusses highlighting site security on your sites. If your site is setup with SSL, then you will have the GoDaddy SSL logo in your footer. Some customers have also added this logo to their welcome text to increase visiblity.
I'll pass on your sugestions about boilerplate information for product and category pages, and better meta-data support to the developers.
Thanks again for the comments. We are paying attention and I think you'll see a lot of improvement over the next months. Stay tuned!
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Every so often a customer credit card gets declines for one reason or another. Usually we contact the customer and try to secure some alternate form of payment. The problem is that my only options for Status at this point are New and Cancelled. Currently, I make the payment notation in the Admin Notes and process the order manually. This requires me to keep track of these special situations and adjust all of my order tracking accordingly. Quite a pain. It would really be helpful to be able to change the status to Invoiced, Completed, Etc. Thanks.
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Brannon,
Thanks for taking the time to suggest an easier workflow. I'll take a look at this section and see if we can add an extra status to accommodate such.
Regards
John
QSC
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I've actually encountered the same searching problems mentioned above... sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Another issue that I've run into, that was actually happening before the upgrade, is, on some computers, the first time you type in my website, or even the quick shopping cart login site, it comes up with a 404 error page. If you hit reload, it works just fine. This happens to some of my customers as well. I tried talking to the support representatives about it, but they just didn't have the experience with quick shopping cart to really help me... they left it as "It's an error on your end"... which cannot be true as no other sites do this but the QSC sites, and it happens on different systems and on different internet providers.
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Justin,
Those issues noticed prior should no longer be occuring. The "error on your end" part is frustrating on both ends since I believe you don't see the site but the people telling you that can see it I'll try to make that phrase go away though I hope since the upgrade you've not seen this.
As for the searching I'm looking into that as I can understand it giving a bad result consistently but not the correct answers on the fifth or sixth go. Thanks for letting us know and providing your feedback.
Regards
John
QSC
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Thanks John,
Glad to know you guys are working on the search.
The issues are actually still occuring (the 404 error)... i'd held off on asking anything until the upgrade was complete, but, unfortunately... it's still present. Does anybody else have the same issue?
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Hi John,
I am just about through "playing" with my new template selection which is Flower Power and want to publish hopefully tomorrow. However, before I do that, I hope you guys have a really quick fix for a couple of small issues.
First is when you select in preferences "Show Add To Cart on category pages", the cart button has a paragraph break that puts it below the price and makes the box lengthen out. It would be a much cleaner look if the add to cart button showed right by the price.
Second, on items that have options, customers have said that it is confusing to see options on that button. Would it be possible to like on the actual product page to have a quantity box, followed by the options, followed by the price and then the add to cart button? Once again a much cleaner look and easier for the customer, particularly if they want to order more than just one item off the category pages (take a look at my website, click on crib bedding, then click BebeStar or CottonTale and then click one of the patterns, from there you will get a better idea of how I do some of my categories, just keep in mind that my site is still showing in the old orange peel style so it will not reflect the issue of the paragraph break I mentioned above). Hope these are easy fixes, as like I mentioned before I would like to publish my "new look" tomorrow, but want it to have a nice clean look on every page. Thanks for any help you can give.
Patti
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Hi Patti,
Thanks for checking in... I'd like to address a few of your questions:
"the cart button has a paragraph break that puts it below the price and makes the box lengthen out. It would be a much cleaner look if the add to cart button showed right by the price."
I can see how that would be another good way to layout the product options! Unfortunately, we don't have an option right now to put the "Buy Now" button next to the price, but I'll add it to our list of features to consider for a future release.
"Would it be possible to like on the actual product page to have a quantity box, followed by the options, followed by the price and then the add to cart button?"
Patti, I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you saying that on the page that lists products (http://dearlittleones.com/category.sc?categoryId=19 for example) you want the price, QTY, list of options, AND the "Add To Cart" button showing for each product? If so, we can take a look at this idea and see if it will fit into our feature roadmap. On the actual product page (http://dearlittleones.com/product.sc?categoryId=19&productId=88) we do show the QTY, options, and "Add To Cart" button, though not in the order you mention here (QTY, options, price, "Add To Cart").
If you can clarify what you're looking for we can take a look at how these features may fit into future development plans. Thanks for taking the time to contact us.
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Hello
I have phoned into customer service 3 or 4 times on this issue, and today Rachel told me about this blog.
I need to say that the Options menu is no good unless the inventory on each option can be controlled. If someone buys an XL shirt when it is not in stock, that is a HUGE problem. Please see if this can be fixed right away.
The good solution would be for the catalog builder to be able to add QTY for each option listed on a product.
Thank you,
Christine
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Greetings Christine,
Glad you found us and sorry it wasn't under more propitious circumstances. While there are work arounds to the issue, though not friendly ones e.g treating them as separate items , I'm in agreement that this makes send and we already have this on our development roadmap to place in a future version.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Hooray! I'm happy to hear this. I've been pestering people about this since for months. It's crucial to those of us who sell clothing. Right now if I have 20 shirts but only 2 smalls I have to keep my inventory at 2 to avoid overselling. Either that or remove the low stock sizes entirely and put them in my ebay store.
How's progress coming on with the functionality for us to choose whether we want items deducted from the inventory immediately when they are placed in the customers cart (my choice) or after payment is processed? Not trying to be a nag ;o) just curious. Thanks!
Lorrie
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Greetings Lorrie,
We're still planning on providing that change on the inventory but we , as a rule, don't have fixed release dates for it. As soon as we have it in a version I'll update the blog.
Regards
John
QSC
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Thanks for your response to my previous post.
1. Regarding the fix of the mis-aligned options on product page templates - please move this to the top of the "to do" pile in your inbox. It looks unsightly to say the least - I wouldn't buy anything from a site that can't keep its options straight. Por favor, I do not want to publish until this abomination is fixed. Chop chop!
2. Second from the top in your inbox: I am in agreement with the chap who suggests something along the lines of "click image for more info" label on the category pages.
Also, si vous plait, could you tell me (and my web developer)how he can tap in the prices/sales price from the shopping cart database for a link on our external storefront? He said he called about this a while back and got the runaround from the phone sucpport.
Wishing 2.0 a speedy recovery.
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Greetings Steve,
There's currently no way to directly obtain this information from the QSC DB but there's some good news in that I added rss feeds as an upcoming feature that would provide an easy way to resuse the carts output on other sites. For the time being it would either require pulling the links or screenscraping the site to get that information.
2. Agreed this would be useful and we're certainly looking into it.
Regards
John
QSC .
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Boy what a run around!! Call customer service they can't help refer to Office of the president. They can't help, can only make "suggestions" for change and refer you to the developers blog! Because after all you are only "one of 100,000 users". Here, they thank you for input and refer you to customer service to tell specifics of problems being had. IN the meantime, more things are broken and or not fixed!!
1. Why can not the "Featured Item Header" in Custom Colors and Fonts have the font choice and size changed? The boxes are already present, and for us "edge users" it is important to have our "branding" match across the website. A Reduction in service here!
2. Where can I send screen shots to show you how it is broken and looks like crap?
3. "Edit Page" under custom colors and fonts, again has the box for font and font size greyed out! Why for goodness sakes, our site uses for "branding" purposes, comic sans serif! The current site has all fonts customized to comic sans, why would you take that away in certain areas? This is a reduction in service!
4. Still has the darned "status: In-stock" under the picture! This should be with the Qty/Price/Buy Now area, or at least an option to have in either place or opt out of showing it. Which if we have to opt out would be another reduction in service!
5. Now the Qty:/Price:/Buy Now:, are indenting their way across the page, instead of being lined up! Messy to say the least.
6. Are there so very many of us users that you don't care how you affect our business? I cannot at this point, republish my site to put up new products before Christmas without having to accept your unfinished and unusable product. I was told by one representative when I asked why no one can give a time frame for "fixing" things that "no one at this company will give you any information on a time frame whether there is one internally or not" and "well you have other choices". Yes I do, but do I have time to search for another service provider and rebuild a new website before Christmas? I thought I had picked the best one.
So since we have been reduced in services and no longer have a truly smooth and working product are we going to see a price reduction as well? What about our reduced ability to publish new products without having things look terrible and affect our customers faith in our business's, what price can be put on that?
But then I am only an "edge user" and "1 of over 100,000 users" and the "vast majority" must rule. I say bull! If it worked before, then being new and improved things should work better and not reduce my website to a hostage of someone's reduction in services!
We need answers! We need fixes!! Not somewhere down the line, some of these are very straight forward to fix and should be taken care of straight away.
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Hi Bernie
Sorry to hear that you feel like you have been getting the run around. Your input is being reviewed, along with that of all the other customers calling in, and we are moving forward with bug fixes where necessary.
On your points 1-3.
If you have specific screen shots to demonstrate an issue then by all means send them in. When you contact customer support you can ask for a reference number for your issue, and then you can email in the screen shots and refer to that reference number so the information is kept together.
Where an option is greyed out, it means that it is inheriting that style element from another piece of the css layout. In these particular instances of the Featured Item and other elements being greyed out preventing your ability to have complete branding over the site, we agree that is a problem so we have assigned this to Development to look into the issues at hand with inheritance to see if we can improve the usability of the customization options.
On 4-5, there are 10 different layouts currently available for product description, does one of those better fit your needs? Or, if there is a product style layout that you think would be useful to have, please let us know and we can add it to our roadmap.
On 6. We do care very much about each and every one of our users and all feedback is reviewed and considered to help formulate the overall direction of our products. There are a lot of things that we are simultaneously working on and to disseminate the information of when each specific issue is going to be resolved to all the customer service people across all our products would be information overload. We fundamentally agree that improvements to a product mean that existing things continue to work as they did or in an alternative/better manner.
Thank you for the feedback,
Rob
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Some additional details on how these templates work that might help explain things a bit better for everyone.
In the Customize Colors and Fonts page, at the bottom there is an item "Sidebar-box-header". The sidebar box is a generic term for any box that will sit in the left or right columns (on either side of the central area where products are displayed). It was put in so that in the future when we develop additional widgets for the side columns (e.g. RSS feeds) the new widget would seamlessly inherit the style set by the Sidebar Box item. Right now, the Featured Item box is one of these that inherits.
Search, and Category were two items that were given individual stylings (that overwrite the default provided by Sidebar) as depending on your template chosen, they could be placed in different positions on the page and therefore may need to look different.
So, right now, the font you set for Sidebar header will apply to Featured Item. We are working on Featured Item to "un-grey out" the font and font size so that it's like Search and Category, for simplicity. This will be in an upcoming patch release.
Its a double (multi?) edged sword to give you the ability to customize things, yet also to do it safely that doesn't mess up a site, yet also be somewhat intuitive for novices, yet also be powerful enough for advanced users. Using Preview allows you to see what your site looks like without publishing, so take advantage of that as you play around with your customization options.
Regards,
Rob
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Steve,
Thanks for clearing up the classic templates CSS's, this would mean that the following areas do not work for customization:
Shopping Cart
Contact Us
Register
Sign-In
Main Page: text under the products
Help: Would be cool to have our custom CSS as well, to complete our sites look
Borders on the main template don't show up on the sides; ticket number [Incident ID: 2476510] says you are looking at this and these features are not customizable at this time, a rough guess when they will be?
New Templates:
Top Menu can't change back ground colors
Not all areas can be customized
Based on this our old layout works, while the new layouts don't work correctly so we are still waiting until patches are in place prior to publishing.
The security piece I was focusing on is not just the SSL connection security, but the complete concept of security meaning that hackers have not stolen user information from GoDaddy Quickshopping Cart users, this has never happened and has been validated by an outside security firm such as http://www.scanalert.com.au, others...
or highlighting the types of network security GoDaddy has in place to reduce hackers success, Database injection exploits, or other injection exploit attempts, etc... just somethings I have seen on other sites to give our customers reassurance not only with the secure transaction but with knowing that their information and privacy is secure.
The ability to secure the entire shopping cart experience from data entry through to purchase would be great to have. Right now when inputing information as a customer billing/shipping info, etc..., this is not secure on my website at this time, securing this with an SSL certificate would add another level of privacy protection for my users and other Quickshopping Cart's. How can this be set-up with my SSL certificate with GoDaddy?
Oh, can we add favicon.ico icons? I have one on my main domain and would like to have the same feel at my sub-domain as well.
With Froogle no-longer, and Google now implementing Google Base, are you going to link to this? Or is your RSS concept going to account for linking to other comparison shopping sites? I know a lot of them have specific feed requirements. Also, since Froogle is no longer, I don't think it should be on the admin panel as an option anymore.
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Hi Vincent,
It's true that our templates (classic and new) do not allow the shop owner to customize these pages. In development, we determined that these pages were crucial to the customer being able to complete their purchases and that it would be better to offer a clean readable version of the content of those pages. However, our goal is always to offer a product that allows you, the shop owners, to create an experience that benefits your customers. I'll add this to our list of features to review for updating/improving for a future release.
"Borders on the main template don't show up on the sides; ticket number [Incident ID: 2476510] says you are looking at this and these features are not customizable at this time, a rough guess when they will be?"
After looking at this on your site, I believe that this is a bug and will write it up and make sure it gets fixed. It will be included in an upcoming patch release.
"New Templates:
Top Menu can't change back ground colors
Not all areas can be customized"
The new templates are designed to be simpler to customize for our uses, and have been designed in-house with a goal of creating attractive, "themed" templates. These templates provide for a certain amount of customization while keeping it within the "theme" (golf, photography, sports, etc) of the template. We have new templates in the queue that will push template appearance to new levels, giving your storefronts a truly professional appearance "out-of-the-box".
Regarding security:
"highlighting the types of network security GoDaddy has in place to reduce hackers success, Database injection exploits, or other injection exploit attempts, etc... just somethings I have seen on other sites to give our customers reassurance not only with the secure transaction but with knowing that their information and privacy is secure."
You're right, security of your data and that of your customers is of paramount importance to us. We do a great deal of security and penetration testing, and I'll pass on your suggestions to the security center.
To setup secure ordering on your site so that the entire shopping experience is secured for your users, you can follow the directions in this Help article:
http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=714
Finally, QSC is connecting to Google Base now instead of Froogle. Thanks for the reminder as far as the menu goes. We'll clean that up in a future release.
Thanks again for your input - I hope that this information helps.
--Steve (QSC)
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Hi John,
Bravo man! The code you supplied worked great and my header is now aligned in the center and my email address is now a mailto link. Thank you for posting the code!
Best regards,
Tony P.
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Tony,
Great to hear it worked out. We'll be putting more snippets of code to assist people with alignment/ style choices (while fixing the more interesting ones permanently
Regards
John
QSC
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..."It's true that our templates (classic and new) do not allow the shop owner to customize these pages. In development, we determined that these pages were crucial to the customer being able to complete their purchases and that it would be better to offer a clean readable version of the content of those pages. However, our goal is always to offer a product that allows you, the shop owners, to create an experience that benefits your customers. I'll add this to our list of features to review for updating/improving for a future release."
This is baloney, nothing gives a customer MORE uneasiness than having things CHANGE from what the rest of the site is BRANDED (by fonts etc.) just as they are about to make a purchase.
They have no assurance that they were not just hijacked to a different site especially when it looks like part one site they started with and part something DIFFERENT.
Sure would be nice if someone could stop ignoring my questions and answer in specifics. Please see listing of specific problems in unpublished previous blog.
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Hi Bernie
I responded to your other post.
Thanks,
Rob
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Hello,
Any idea on the time frame of the patch when the drop down menu will be able to display the options entirely. Currenly in the preview the options are still cutting off.
Thanks,
Ravi K.
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Hi Ravi
Right now we have a work around where Product Style 8 is allowing greater widths on the dropdowns, so if that style works for you, give that a go. The fix to all product styles is in our next release (2.0.5) which is hopefully just a couple of weeks away.
Thanks,
Rob
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Hi. I've been very happy the 2.0 updates, I'm sure it's been quite an undertaking on your part.
I apologize for asking this again but can you please let me know if it will it be possible in the next update for QSC to return the prior function that allowed the inventory to be deducted as soon as the item is placed in a customer's shopping cart (as opposed to the current situation where the item is not being deducted until the payment is processed)? This is extremely critical to our business to prevent overselling. Because I do, on occasion, have to sleep, I'm not able to manually process each order immediately. Our most popular item is a handmade dog snuggle bag bed and because they are handmade our inventory will only contain 1 or 2 in any particular fabric. Some of the fabrics sell immediately so I know overselling is going to be a problem and therefore I'm very anxious about this. I don't want to have to sell these items only in my ebay store as they are unique to our business and we've got a very good reputation for the quality of our craftsmanship. I swear I didn't sleep a wink last night worrying about this. So I thought I would ask and hope for the best. As the Stones would say "You can't always get what you want but if you try sometime, you'll get what you need." So I'm trying! Thanks for understanding.
Regards,
Lorrie
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Lorrie,
Presently there's a discussion on this issue which is for once, a true dilemma. The item being deducted prior to the payment was effectively leaving items off the market too. I get the importance of this change and the ramifications as you have outlined them.
Until we either have a switch to select between the two behaviours / revert to the prior scheme, frankly I prefer the former,.I'm trying to think of workarounds that would be viable but so far nothing that I like's appeared. I'll update the blog / this comment tomorrow with any new information that comes to light.
Regards
John
QSC Team
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John,
I personally prefer the present behavior where items or not taken away from inventory unless the payment is received. You see, I have an inventory of '1' for most of my items. And I get quite a few abandoned carts, which means the inventory is 'zero' when in realty it has not been purchased. I have to then cancel the order which puts the item back in inventory. Simple - it's not a sale until payment is received. Just my opinion for what it's worth.
And off topic, QSC IS of great value. I wish a lot of features worked better (actually, simpler) for someone with little or no expertise in html but I suppose that's primarily my problem. So it is what it is.
BTW, how does my site look?
Thank you.
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Greetings Samar,
Thanks for illustrating the other half to our dilemma. As I mentioned in the prior post we'd be discussing this issue today.Realistically there's no work around that's satisfactory that would please either side other than making this behaviour an option in the inventory section which is what I've requested we do.
With regards to the features working better that's a continual goal of balancing ease of use versus expansion as your needs grow. If there's specific behaviours/ issues that you wish me to consider providing without reaching for HTML ( I plan to have more instructional items up on this blog soon re common tasks) let me know and we'll look at including them into a future version.
John
QSC Team
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Hi John,
Thank you so very much for looking in to this. I feel better now knowing that you are trying to come up with a solution. After reading Samar's post I see the other half of the issue but I must be lucky because in the 8 months I've had my QSC I've never had an abandoned cart or had to cancel an order. Actually that's true with my ebay store also. In over 2 yrs I've only had 4 unpaid item issues. I've got wonderful customers! Which is why I'm stressing over this particular matter. In my opinion, from a customer's standpoint, I think it's better to show an item as out of stock than have the customer be excited with their purchase and then be told "oops, sorry, that item is out of stock". I feel it doesn't reflect well on the business. Personally, I'd rather lose a sale then disappoint a customer. The only solution I've come up with in the interim to avoid overselling (and this is totally lame) is to manually remove the items with only 1 in stock from my inventory after business hours each evening and then re-list them each morning. Most of the time my customers email me when they want something that's out of stock. In any event, thanks again for addressing this issue. I'll be following this blog anxiously awaiting news. Take care! :o)
Lorrie
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Greetings,
No problem we often find that there's two, or more, valid answers to a problem like this. Other than a notice on unique items to check that they are in stock by mail / calling there's not much more you could do other than the steps you're taking. As soon as we have this in place we'll update the blog.
John
QSC
Team
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Hey! Wait a minute! I just caught on to this blog because I wasn't liking the update - (way too busy to redo everything by the way - thanks for that!:-() - I was told MONTHS AGO by one of your tech supports guys that there was no way to track abandoned carts. I was having trouble during a huge ad campaign and you could not help me.
Please, please advise!
Oh, the invoice still looks like 12 year old did it - any updates on the updates?
J.
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Greetings Janit,
In what must be the fastest ever turnaround on a blog post , that's the good news at least to the abandoned cart There are workarounds that may be usable with third party tracking service ( e.g Google analytics ) by inserting them either into your header or footer area . I'm still doing research on this but will post my findings as I get more examples functioning.
While the default invoice we did just improve this and before we "ground" the twelve year old I'd be grateful if you could provide me with specific examples were we can improve beyond our recent changes.
Regards
John
QSC Team
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Hi John,
Thanks for the speedy reply - I'll return the favor.
I look forward to your future examples on the tracking services that you mention - and I'll look into the Google analytics too.
And, would also love to oblige:
- The logo image comes out very fuzzy.
- The business name almost is on top of the logo.
- It looks like mis-match type comparing the items/content with the headers, footers and the column heads.
- The type sizes are off - the business name should be the biggest and go down from there in priority fashion.
- The old invoice style was easier to read because the important stuff - the order itself - was boxed off and nicely spaced.
- And would love some balance, or centering with the header and footer so it looks nice....
Maybe grounding is a bit harsh - it is the final long weekend, eh? And, if he (she?) didn't know better than how would he know? You know?
I'll stop now while I'm ahead... have a great weekend and thanks for the laugh,
J.
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Janit,
Thank you this will be most useful. We'll revisit this invoice with these comments in mind.
Regards
John
Qsc
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Hi guys,
I ran a huge Labor Day sale only to discover, like Lorrie Corsetti above, that my inventory was not being depleted. This has been a huge disaster for my website- tons of items oversold.
With this update, I feel like I was blindsided with tons of extra work-just fixing my colors took hours- and now this Inventory processing change. Are there any other major changes that you haven't told us about? Is there a more comprehensive list somewhere of all the changes that were made?
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Stephanie,
With regards to the inventory issue we are working towards providing this as an option to remove from the inventory prior to purchase made / vice versa. Meanwhile reverting it to the prior value would upset a similar number of users so
With regards to the nature of the update , the notification was certainly an issue, e.g no practical notice was given which is something that I'm addressing for future issues of the blog. I'll be posting on this topic in the near future. As to the list of changes there's nothing major that comes to mind that wasn't in the release notes (at least that change the feature as obviously as the inventory item)
Regards
John
QSC team
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John, et all
To get google analytics working you can insert your code in the header area or I was able to get it to work by inserting it into the welcome text area from the previous version.
Just copy and paste the code into either of these areas. You can look at my source code, if you pull up http://shop.exclusivethaidecor.com based on the old template to validate what I am saying.
It should work just as fine in the new header area, google is looking for the code on the page you want the stats on. Once it is in the header, it will propagate through your entire site, so you will get the stats for your entire site. John, please validate that last statement.
Also, you should be able to put the Yahoo meta tag in the header for their confirmation. I can't validate this as I have made too many changes and need a few fixes before I can publish. Google's is a script, but yahoo's is a meta tag that is why I am not 100% sure, John, if you could validate this as well, thanks.
Hope this helps, from a users perspective.
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Greetings,
Ok the Google code works as stated, place within the header and then wait a random period for Google to pick this up and you'll start seeing hits. ( mine took about 8 hours fyi)
For the Yahoo Meta tag I am going to guess that you mean their search marketing ID? If so there's no need to put this in your header we have a home for that already here
Site Promotion > Conversion > Yahoo!(r)
Of course if there's some other meta that's betta you are referring to please let me know and I'll have another go at validation.
Regards
John
Qsc team.
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Two critical functions overlooked in this release: (i) if you provide a coupon to the same value as the total amount, so that the net is zero, QSC still requires a form of payment (dumb!) and (ii) if a customer enters a credit card for a purchase that is then declined, there is no way to resubmit the transaction - the customer has to start again from scratch (equally dumb).
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Greetings,
On the former it doesn't appear logical to do so and although it's an edge case for people to give away items gratis we'll close it within a future release. We're reviewing the workflow of the rejection process though to see if there's a better way we can accommodate this. Thanks for the feedback.
Regards
John
QSC
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Comments on design & functionality,
In the Health & Fitness template the catalog listing on the left menu has the first line of category indented but the second line is not indented. This makes that listing not look good or pleasing to the eye. Can the second line be shift to the right so it doesn't start in front of the first line?
I noticed this when thinking about SEO, and how search engines look at the H-tags that are embedded in sites, and will rate the relevancy of titles with H-tags against their descriptions.
Thus, if we could have the ability to have two different areas for our titles, one for the product category in the main page under the pictures. The second for the listing of our categories in the left column. This way we can be brief, not run into the first problem I identified above, and second then we can have better SEO on our main page?
Hope this makes sense, any word on when the latest patch will be released to fix some of our bugs, and add functionality...(such as the ability to change all the colors on the other pages that are fixed with black, of course backgrounds if we can get them as well or your tool to allow us to move our current CSS settings to another template)?
"For the Yahoo Meta tag I am going to guess that you mean their search marketing ID? If so there's no need to put this in your header we have a home for that already here
Site Promotion > Conversion > Yahoo!(r) "
I understand this is a tag to help us determine how well our ad compaigns are doing with yahoo, you have the google one on the same page:
I am talking about https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
Which is just like Googles webmaster tools. Load a site index/map in yahoo format, so they can come crawl, index, etc...your site. But it is authenticated like googles and you can see yahoo's results of how successful they are on searching your website, etc...
I hope this helps, lots of questions and answers.
v/r
Vincent
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Greetings Vincent,
Thanks for getting back to me. SEO is certainly an area I'm planning on addressing as well as expansion of what items the user can interact with. Being able to migrate settings would indeed be useful and I have to say that the method I had in mind is quite closely linked to your concerns.
Regards
John
QSC
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Hi:
There are still a few important issues with the 2.0 upgrade that have not been addressed on this blog.
(1)The invoices now show "payment status: incomplete" immediately after the customer places their order. While I understand that the order is unpaid until the credit card is processed it is very confusing to the customer. A number of people have called asking why their payment status shows incomplete. They believe they have made a mistake. This needs to be corrected as soon as possible. A much better word for the payment status at this stage would be "pending".
(2)The address manager export function is not working properly. All the quantities of addresses default to either "2" or "3" and create duplicate and triplicate entries upon export. Manually resetting the counters to "1" has no effect on the export.
(3)IE6 causes the body of the product description to only fill about half the page. It works fine in FF and IE7.
(4) We have been told to make sure that our customizations are xhtml compliant. However you have not been xhtml compliant on your end. Every page I run through the validator has a number of xhtml errors that are in your programming and not in my customizations.
Thank you for looking into these issues.
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Greetings,
1) We'll take a look into this though it's a case of semantics and we're reviewing your suggestion to see if there's better ways in which we can represent this.
2) This is undergoing testing and should be in the next release.
3) This is another issue that should be resolved in the near future.
4) The latter is the scheme we're using to validate how it interacts with our app rather than how our app interacts with the web. So while we're addressing the issues on our side preventing further ones entering the system is still a desirable goal.
Regards
John
QSC team
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I 2 things i want to talk about
(1) I cannot make my logo to be center. I have tried everything. Can you please tell me a code so i can center my logo pic
(2) I was wondering if you can have link of " Site Map " where customers can all our links of our website. I have seen every website have one
Waiting for your kind reply
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Greetings,
1) We've amended the logo to center.
2) We currently do not have a sitemap of that description and the way the navigation's constructed really makes it hard to see what one gains from doing so. We'll consider this for a future release.
Regards
John Qsc Team.
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I cannot find the tag that colors the font which describes line items on the checkout page. Can someone tell me which modifier it is?
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Greetings,
I'm afraid the bad news is that those line items on the checkout page are currently not alterable by the user. Basically we need that page to display correctly all the time for the purchaser and while we're looking at ways to increase customization of all parts of the store there are some that we need as many browsers to render correctly as possible in areas that we consider the damage to sales would be far outweighed by the changing of the output.
Firstly let me apolgize for the delay , I assure you the nice people at support are faster
Regards
John
QSC team.
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Two things that I cannot seem to get an answer from customer service. First, when I do the "banner" GIF image so that it spans my webstore the quality of the lettering is poor and hard to read. Suggestions? Second, I have had customer comments that the shipping is not coming up "Free" as I have promoted because it is mixed in under the discounts section at checkout with any coupons used. Is there a way to "go back to the old way" so you have separate discount lines for shipping and any coupons? I look forward to your suggestions
Ryan
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Hi Ryan
Looking at your setup, it appears that your gif image is too large and is being compressed into the space to fit? This could be the cause. Maybe try uploading an image around 750 pixels wide.
To your second comment, shipping is its own line item in the summary and coupons are on a separate line, so they should be separate. We can take a look at this with our usability group to see if there is a better way of representing the information.
Thanks for the contribution,
Rob
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I am having problems getting shipping addresses out of QSC and into UPS CampusShip, which is UPS's best and easiest to use Internet shipping shipping system. The process I use now works, but is time consuming and error prone and takes someone with a great deal of expertise, since so much has to be done manually. Can you just provide us with an easy way to select addresses to export all on 1 screen, then a button that will create an .xls spreadsheet or .csv file that can be imported into UPS CampusShip? If it helps any, the columns have to be in the following order, and none can be missing:
Company Name Nick Name Contact Name Street Address Line 1 Street Address Line 2 Street Address Line 3 City St/Prov Postal Cd Country Contact Phone Contact Tel Ext Contact Email Contact Fax Res Ind Loc ID Cons Ind Account Number Acc Postal Cd
Please contact me if you need further specs, as I am very familiar with the data and formats by now and can tell you what is best to use in the various fields that do not map directly to UPS.
This feature would REALLY help a lot, as it is something that has to be done over and over and over again, each time we ship.
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Hi Sandra
Thanks for the detailed information. We are not too familiar with CampusShip so we will look into this in more detail to see what options are available.
I would be interested to hear from other readers of the blog if they are using CampusShip or not, and if they are, have they found any work arounds?
Thanks for the suggestions,
Rob
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Anyone who ships via UPS should really check into CampusShip.
Other QSC users might not be aware of the UPS CampusShip product. The UPS website (ups.com) doesn't mention it. We did not know about it until we got an actual UPS account rep. It is free and very similar to shipping through www.ups.com, except on steroids. We had tried UPS WorldShip for a while, but found it much harder to use.
BTW, along with CampusShip we also got some pretty decent discounts on UPS rates which have significantly helped our bottom line, so taking the time to setup a relationship with UPS has really paid off.
Now, if QSC could just make address exporting a little easier for us by exporting ALL fields (including phone and email addresses) in a format that can be directly imported, we could ship orders in a shorter time with less cost and a lot fewer errors.
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Greeting Sandra,
Thanks for the feedback with regards to campus ship I just took a wander over their to take a look at how we could accommodate the request with regards to making the export easier, more complete.
Regards
John
QSC-team
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John
Thanks very much for fixing the duplicate address labels on export so quickly! That is a good first step.
Now, for the CampusShip export file. The most important thing to add to the QSC address labels export spreadsheet is the phone number and email address of each order, as getting those out of the QSC is a very tedious process at the moment since each order has to be done manually.
The rest of the massaging can be done in Excel relatively easily, by comparison, so just adding these fields would hold me for a while.
I don't want to publish my actual customer data on this blog, but I will send you a sample file separately, if that would help. it would show you what I was able to import successfully into CampusShip so you know what is needed. It might save you some time. Just ask and you shall receive. :-)
--
Thanks,
Sandra
KeylessEntryLocks.com
630-955-9512
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Sandra,
It's ok I can get the info required without the need for the sample file and will make inquiries on when we can take a look at adding that option to the export on the address labels. As to the ability to select that as a default rather than enter each item to check the box that's under consideration too.
Regards
John
QBC
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It's been a while and I haven't heard back on this--any news on the status of my request to add phone numbers and email addresses to the exported address data?
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Sandra,
This is still within the roadmap for inclusion at a future point. I'm afraid I don't have a release timeline for this specific item but it is one I will follow up on after the holiday.
Regards
John
QSC Team
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But it's yellow text on a white background and is barely readable? That can't be right??
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Hi LeAnn
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Looking at your site, in the checkout page, I see product items listed in grey text on a light grey background.
Regards
Rob
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How do I get Stats on the QSC like hits, etc.
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Hi Jenny
You can put javascript into the Header or Footer, or you could consider a product like our Traffic Facts which measures site activity.
Regards
Rob
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Two things, it would be nice to be able to create new pages, then I could add links to other sites there. And also, when are we going to have an input box as an attribute. We supply personal embroidered items and we need a box for customers to input what they want embroidered on their items
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Greetings,
We're thinking the same thing and are in the process of discussing how we're going to add this to a future version of QSC. With regards to the attribute being a free text box we'll take a look into that.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Is there anyway, I can check the stats of my store. If not then any plans in the future. Also does the QSC team have any intentions of introducing Pagination anytime in the future.
Thx,
Ravi K.
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Ravi,
I need more information on which specific stats you're looking for above and beyond the reports within the app?. Pagination is on the roadmap for a future edition though it doesn't have a fixed release date presently.
Regards
John
QSC team.
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I am looking for Web Stats ie http://shop.domain.com/stats. The regular stats such as referring urls, number of visits, unique visitors, etc.
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Greetings,
QSC doesn't have it's own set of statistics for the hosting side but we do have a separate application which QSC can use, Traffic Facts, to provide far more details. There are also third party services that can be similarly integrated to QSC such as sitemeter and google analytics which you may wish to investigate too.
Regards
John
QSC
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I've had this issue since the new version of QSC came out. We've switched templates, we've filed half-a dozen trouble tickets. There apparently is no answer at GoDaddy for this, but I am losing half of my would-be customers who come in on IE6 browsers. On my store hompeage, my left hand column of category links is sliding all the way down to the bottom of the page in IE6. Folks email me and tell me they can't figure out how to navigate my store without those category links up at the top.
I don't need another trouble ticket filed. Nobody at GoDaddy can help me on this. I want to know if others have or are experiencing this and what the solution might be. There is not a problem on any of our other pages on this particular issue as the category links are up at the top of the page there (although IE6 users do report other page issues). FYI, we have no GIFs on the homepage and all the code is closed as required.
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Vic,
We've identified the cause of this issue within IE6 and will address this within the next update
Regards
John
QSC
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I have 2 questions...
1. I have read that you can customize special instructions and actually name it differently - how do you do this?
2. I have detailed special instructions that require more than 50 character spaces. I can't image many "special instructions" could be clearly explained in 50 character spaces, actually - can you give us more spaces [unlimited would be nice] so that we can accurately explain our "special instructions"?
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Hi Cynthia
In the Admin, if you go to Storefront | Preferences and scroll to the bottom, there is the section to rename the label for Special Instructions. Right now we need to keep that box fixed in size to fit with the rest of the page, so we constrain the space. Its a space for the customer to put in a comment to the merchant, and designed to be a short note. The intent is that if the customer wanted to give more instructions, they would probably be emailing the merchant.
Thanks for the interesting questions.
Regards
Rob
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OK--I hired a designer/developer as GoDaddy asked that I do to fix the issue I have with my left-column category links sliding to the bottom of my store homepage with ONLY IN IE6 (which remains the most popularly used browser). This is what she said:
There doesn't appear to be too much you can do, as it is in the script and it doesn't really let you access that portion. It only lets you add things to the menu section through your admin. If you have an area in the template where you can add a top alignment to the menu section, you might be able to try that, but since Godaddy offers it as a goddaddy option, they have to support it, I would continue to bug them, as it is a bug in their script for IE6, probably something with their upgrade, so they need to fix that.
I am sure you aren't the only one experiencing this with their cart, and the more complaints there are, then the more likely they will have to fix it.
So how about it?
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Vic,
Firstly sorry for the delay.This is indeed an issue we're looking into and while I was going to hold your comment until I could give a full explanation / resolution I just wanted you to know that we're actively looking at this and while update this as soon as we have a solution.
Regards
John
QBC team
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I had similar issues after the 2.0 upgrade. It turns out that xhtml is very intolerant of open div statements. It is imperative that there is a for every open . Otherwise IE6 renders the left column improperly. As soon as I fixed that issue on my customizations the left column rendered properly in IE6.
Since your cart is highly customized I suspect that this may not be a Godaddy issue but rather an issue with your customization and open div statements.
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David--or anyone--I think I know, but can you spell out exactly what is meant by "open div statements"?
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Vic:
An open div statement is any use of the div code without the appropriate /div code. You or your programmer need to count up every open div command (div) but with brackets and every closed (/div) command and make sure the number of open and closed div statements are equal. For example, if you have eight div commands there must also be eight /div commands.
I am not 100% sure this is your issue but I think it is likely. If you want to check for sure, cut all your code from the product full description. Open notepad and paste your code in it for safekeeping. Then save and preview your product with no custom coding. If it renders correctly then your code is causing the problem.
Don't forget to paste your backup into the product description again and save so as not to lose any of the work done to date.
You can also try the xhtml validator here:
http://validator.w3.org/
This will show you all invalid code and will make it easier to locate the problem.
Good luck!
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This blog will not post code in brackets. The corrsetion to my previous statement is:
"It is imperative that there is a closed div statement for every open one."
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Ahhh....finally the invoices look great since this last release. I had no issues with my site but when the Items section on my invoices were twice the font size as the rest of the invoice it was horrible looking. Now the font matches the rest of the invoice. Thanks for the updates and keep up the good work! :)
On another note, is there any plans to offer the option of dealer pricing for certain accounts after they log on? My site is currently retail only, but I have a lot of dealers who sell my products as well. It would be great to offer them the option to log on to my site and get their dealer prices instead of me manually creating invoices for them in Excel. They would of course have to register first and then I'd update their account to dealer status.
Best regards,
Tony P.
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Tony,
Glad the invoices are working, ok looking great if you insist
Regards
John
QSC Team
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I have a couple question, Just wondering if we will see any different category layouts, maybe like 3 images across with the 175 width thumbnails, kinda standard style for most e-commerce sites.
Second, Is it feasable to set it up so we can have page navigation within category pages? The scrolling is excessive sometimes.
Last, I have a total black background and footer, is there anyway to change the color of the font for the Secondary Menu in the footer, it defaults black, which makes them impossible to see on my page.
Thanks,
Lionel
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Greetings Lionel,
Wouldn't category view 4 fit that model though I don't have the exact size in my head . The page navigation within the category pages isn't something we can currently accommodate without using further sub categories but I will look into this further for inclusion in a future release.
The last part on the classic templates you would have been able to change with Navigation 2 but it looks like that template choice is not available on the current choice. It looks like the footer color itself would need to be changed as it presently stands which I know isn't too useful as far as the design goes. Maybe recreating the links within the footer itself rather than the program doing so and applying an inline style to it.
Regards
John
QSC team.
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John, thanks again for taking the time. You're correct, category view 4 and 6 are kinda what I am talking about, but those tiny 60 wide thumbnails don't cut it, for me anyway. The only layout using the 175 width thumbnails is catagory view 3. I am using this right now, but thats where the excessive scrolling comes into play....
As for the page navigation, it would be so much nicer with that option. I see there is page navigation when you preform a search, but it doesn't display any thumbnail images. With the thumbs, this would be an awesome addition to QSC, way more professional looking, IMHO.
Lastly, I did what you said on the footer secondary menu, I re-created the links, it works good, but I needed to insert a code to force it to load last, because it was displaying in the middle of the page sometimes, depending on how many items in that catagory... (I think page navigation would help with this problem too).... But. hey, ya gotta do what, ya gotta do, to make things work sometimes.
Thanks for all your efforts,
Lionel
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Lionel,
We'll take a look at ways of accommodating this either by giving the store owner the choice or making it an option. Pagination too, though it's already on the roadmap. Glad you got around the black text on black background and we'll work on making that a more agreeable process for all.
Regards
John
QSC team
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How do you add a vacation setting to the storefront? I will be closed for a week and want to alert potential customers.
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Matt,
You could accommodate this by adding the note to the header or footer areas or modify the welcome message to show your status. There's no store wide "Vacation mode" presently within the cart. I wouldn't mind having such a setting , almost an "away message" , feature and will look into it
Regards
John
QSC Team
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Hello!
I choose the QSC over a year ago because I was told that it can integrate with Quickbooks on my Mac (yes, I was told). After setting the store up, I found out that it didn't. While it still "tightens my jaw", I'm am still tripping over myself trying to keep my inventory accurate.
Is there any other Mac-friendly accounting/inventory program that can work with QSC? Will there ever
be?
Signed,
Hopelessly Devoted...
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Hi Janit
To our knowledge there is no webconnector for the Mac yet. I am sorry that you were led to believe otherwise, the rep may have been confused with the webconnector versus the actual Quickbooks product working on the Mac. As for other programs, I do not know of any. Maybe someone else in our user group has a suggestion?
Regards
Rob
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Is there a way to add a favicon?
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Greetings,
Presently we don't have that ability within QSC but it is on our To do list for a future edition.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Hello QSC,
I am just checking. I sent a request to you approx. one year ago regarding the option of providing a per product tax exempt option. You came back and said this is on your roadmap. I still remain very pleased with QSC, but am wondering when this particular option will become available.
Also, I notice many shopping carts provide shipping help for the buyer in the help or customer service page of the shopping cart. This could include what type of shipping services are available and flat shipping fees, if applicable. Please let me know if you have considered this or if there is a way to set that up now. I think it is important for the customer to know alot about the shipping options, even before they shop.
Thanks again and I will look forward to hearing from you!
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Greetings,
I"m about to post an entry on a work around for this item. We still have it on the road map to revise the manner in which taxes , at all levels are handled, but in the meantime I hope the suggestions I have will be of use to you. As soon as it's reviewed I'll put it out there.
There's no explicit section in Quick Shopping cart for context sensitive help presently but we do have our custom and terms and conditions pages which fulfill most of the abilities you've mentioned. and linking to them within the footer region to that section. You can get there by going to STOREFRONT and clicking on "add terms & conditions" You can then choose which sections you display in your general conditions.
Regards
John
QSC team
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Thanks for letting me know about the upcoming tax revisions in QSC. I will work on refining my Terms and conditions to help reflect the shipping options on my site.
Mike
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